Strike Your Heart by Amélie Nothomb, tr. Alison Anderson

[3.5] My first Amélie Nothomb book (and the author's 25th novel). I don't think I've ever read a novella which read so much like a short story. Its economy of style and summary descriptions of time passing are like a paradigm of the short form's approach to long durations. In tone and content it feels like an intermingling of realist fable with case studies from psychology and self-help texts.

The focus is family psychodrama. In 1971, beautiful, egotistical teenager Marie has started secretarial college, and can't wait to launch herself into the era's burgeoning youth culture and put her stamp on life: "Wherever you went, you heard: “Make way for the young.”". But within 6 months she is pregnant and married to the local eligible bachelor (a genuinely nice young chap) in her provincial French home town - and she feels that *her* story is over. Thereafter there are only a handful of references to culture or the news, and the reader is placed into the inner life of Marie's perceptive eldest daughter Diane, trying to come to terms with a mother who is jealous of her. The narrative follows Diane from babyhood through her exemplary school career and the birth two siblings - while she spends more and more time with her loving grandparents - to university as a workaholic postgrad medical student, where, with the magnetic female lecturer she assists, she re-enacts her relationship to her mother.

Much like psychological case studies, there are aspects of Diane, Marie and their relatives which can be achingly relatable, or familiar from people one knows, but the story and pattern is a little too tidy. Real people, if one knows them well enough - not just via brief acquaintance or forum posts - don't often conform this neatly to labels; they have bits and pieces that don't fit, or they seem partly like one type and partly like others.

My reading experience oscillated between emotive identification and finding plot points contrived or plasticky. I loved Diane's realisation from an early age that no matter how much you understand the inner workings of a difficult parent, above-average insight and empathy does nothing to change them; apparently you're good at this thing, they may even say so, but it's irrelevant: the brick wall remains steadfast. I've seen a family where a lovely grandma, apparently inexplicably, had also produced a daughter who was very unpleasant to some of her own children, and tried to make up for it. And Mme Aubusson was different enough from Marie - and in the initial descriptions of her similar to several teachers I liked but most other kids were scared of - that I found it wholly believable that Diane might be drawn to her. The book is spot on about the attitudes of some medics of that older generation:
"You’ll see what it’s like, dealing with heart patients: nine times out of ten, the pathology is caused by excess fat, and the treatment means putting the patient on a diet. When you tell them to stop eating butter, they’ll look at you as if you were a murderer. When they come back three months later and you’re surprised there’s been no change, they will tell you a blatant lie: ‘Doctor, I don’t understand, I followed all your recommendations.’"

But deaths and other big changes in the novel occurred at conveniently deus-ex-machina times; the conversations between child siblings read as if the kids already had grounding in psychology. I could absolutely believe little Diane's inner insight, which was beautifully described as an adult might articulate inchoate understanding many years later, but the utterances often read as if the kids had got the concepts from a self-help book, rather than expressing them as experienced, or as if thinking of them anew.

I had recently read this New Statesman interview with Leïla Slimani in which Slimani says she interviewed psychiatrists to help build the sex-addict protagonist of Adèle; this made it seem even more plausible that Nothomb had used case-studies as a starting point for Strike Your Heart, at least as much as the Alfred de Musset quote referenced in the title and which becomes a touchstone for Diane.

Before the last 18 months or so, I was very interested in novels that provided opportunities for psychological processing - but now, I feel like I have gone over the same ground enough times. These books are no longer as compelling as they were, and I'd rather read something with a more outward focus. Not necessarily a stack of state-of-the-nation novels, but a book in which the action is related to the wider world. At the moment, I'm also reading Annie Ernaux's The Years: a 'collective biography' of Frenchwomen born during the Second World War, replete with folk and pop culture, and life lived against a backdrop of politics and social change. That is my catnip, and almost every paragraph is thrilling. Whereas Nothomb's chamber-piece Strike Your Heart - although in its narrow focus appropriately evocative of Marie's effects on Diane, and likely to connect deeply with readers who are in the right place for it - doesn't press the buttons it would have if I'd read it a few years ago, and I'm more aware of its flaws because I hear beyond the chords striking in my head.

As in the Latvian novella Soviet Milk (English tr. 2018, Peirene Press) also about a difficult mother-daughter relationship of the same era in which one of the pair is a doctor (these two books would make a good dual review), I felt that the author doesn't give enough attention to the social and historical circumstances that lead the mother to being in the position she is. i.e. To being a mother in her early twenties when, had she been that age more recently, she may be more likely to have decided motherhood was not for her at all because of her mental health and dedication to work (Soviet Milk) or to postpone it because she wanted to live 'for herself' more first, as has become entirely normal.

This is a book that could be a 5-star experience for the right reader, although it wasn't for me. It doesn't entirely put me off reading more Nothomb, especially as many of her books are short, but if I tried one more and also found this case-study like aspect to it, I wouldn't be keen to read further volumes.

The review on Goodreads

The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard, tr. Mark Polizzotti

Winner of the 2017 Prize Goncourt, newly translated to English and published by Picador UK in January 2019.
⭐⭐⭐ ½
What is the purpose of novels like this one, with stories that stick closely to real historical events?

I can only suppose that here, one purpose was to relate history in a style different from a serious non-fiction history book. And, if you are not otherwise very interested in the minutiae of the events, and don't object to the addition of the occasional sneeze, speculation on how a historical figure felt, and conversations about [classical] music politicians were known to like, it makes for more lively reading.

The other is perhaps to get the attention of that subgroup of literary fiction readers who rarely pick up a history book - especially in a case like this, where historical events are related with an eye to contemporary political relevance; it is one of the countless books that could share the title The Nazis: A Warning from History. It addresses support for the Nazis from German big business of the 1930s, and the stages of the Austrian Anschluss.

The Order of the Day is very short and was first published, in France, in May 2017 so it's reasonable to assume it, or most of it, was written in 2016 - although French writers were already concerned about the rise of nationalism a little earlier: there are several far-right characters in Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex 1, released in January 2015.

In 2016, analogies between the Nazis, the 1930s, and current global politics seemed urgent and novel to Anglo-American readers of centre and left-leaning mainstream news, but over the last 2-3 years they have become commonplace cliché, and been joined or superseded by more nuanced comment that we should be mindful equally of similarities and of differences. So The Order of the Day does not feel as fresh and timely as it may have when it was entered for (and won) the 2017 Prix Goncourt.

In a recent discussion thread, The Order of the Day was mooted as a potential inclusion on next month's Booker International longlist, as a 'Brexit book'. However, in the UK, the Brexit vote created divisions which do not mirror those in the novel, especially as readers of translated literary fiction are more likely than the average person to be Remain supporters, and most moderate individuals are tired of the accusation of "Nazi" being flung around by both sides. The Order of the Day is bookended by chapters indicting German captains of industry for financially and politically enabling the rise and endurance of Hitler's regime; they felt that a Nazi government would provide a stable environment for business. (For those outside the UK, big business is overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU, and this is known to probably everyone in the country who's able to understand the news - but the idea of 'dark money' backing a no-deal Brexit only has currency among politics geeks on the left.) Near the end of the book, Alfried Krupp - son of one of those business leaders, and who, behind a facade of good publicity for making reparations to Jews, is said to have made anti-Semitic remarks and dragged out the reparation negotiations deliberately - "would nonetheless become one of the most powerful figures in the Common Market, the king of coal and steel, a pillar of Pax Europaea." The pro-European idea of the Pax Europaea as a strategy to prevent a similar war or repression happening again does not obviously come up in the book. Nazi entanglement with German manufacturing is shown as an inescapable legacy, in the same way that historians of colonial slavery in the Americas have shown that its influence remains with us not only because of racial inequality, but in via Western taste for sugar, coffee and cotton.

I don't think The Order of the Day works as a Brexit novel specifically- it is better seen as one relating to the rise of the far right in general, and a cautionary tale about the complacency of neighbouring countries - British and French inaction and appeasement are prominent in the diplomatic scenes.

Although recent events do not bear out some of Vuillard's details:
It’s strange how the most dyed-in-the-wool tyrants still vaguely respect due process, as if they want to make it appear that they aren’t abusing procedure, even while riding roughshod over every convention.
Whilst it is overkill to describe Trump as a tyrant, this generalisation about dangerous political leaders is clearly not true of him.


Other reviews, and blurbs, for the book have described it as narrating a series of steps by which the Nazis rose to power and war became inevitable. However, it jumps straight from the meeting of business leaders with Hitler in early 1933, to the 1938 "summit" which preceded the Anschluss. There are many points in between which could have been highlighted if charting that trajectory was the novel's aim, not least Britain and France's impassive stance on Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War. It isn't clear to me why Vuillard has chosen the Anschluss as his focus (perhaps he is implying that another power should have invaded and destroyed the broken-down German materiel near Linz, starting the war earlier) - but it was quite interesting, as I haven't studied the political history of WWII formally since secondary school, and most of my own reading has been about social history or tactics. There were quite a few details here I hadn't heard before, or had long forgotten. I suppose I've never actively sought this stuff out because I still find it a bit distasteful reading about the Nazi leadership without comedy to take the edge off - these warmongers without whom none of my grandparents would have met, and two of them would not have had to hide in cargo crates - and in some echo of that, I felt slightly nervous through the 1930s and the war in the book, and relaxed once the narrative got to the Nuremberg Trials and we've 'survived'.

The first review I read of this book was from the Spectator, posted in a Goodreads discussion thread. There was some suggestion that the Spectator reviewer disliked the book because of opinions in the narrative. Not those about Hitler and other major politicians, which it describes as 'uncontroversial' but some phrases about business, for example: Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political contributions.. Or perhaps the hints that the contemporary global situation is growing more and more like Chamberlain's dinner party with Ribbentrop, where the PM, a model of upper-middle class politeness, continued to listen to the German ambassador's small-talk without confrontation, although he'd been handed news of the Anschluss.

For me personally, the most interesting and confrontational point was part of a sentence from Lord Halifax: "'And I daresay if we were in their [the Nazis'] position we might feel the same.’ Such were the foundations of what, still today, we call the Policy of Appeasement."
For those of us who grew up with the ideal of listening to, understanding and empathising with all sides - and that it was more laudable to strive to understand those on the other side than to be partisan (a product of the tail end of the post-war consensus and the dawn of third-way politics) the recent shift towards polarised extremes and no-platform/don't debate fascists is disorientating. It is hard to find your footing when some of the ideas you learnt as the polestar of everyday morality don't always correlate with magnetic north any more, but sometimes they still do. Now the rules have different patterns, but only in some places, and the pin of the compass won't quite settle.

Otherwise, for me the most interesting parts of The Order of the Day were not about political leaders. They were about the lesser-known famous people mentioned in passing, like the artist Louis Soutter (whose drawings, made in an asylum, Vuillard sees as an unwitting allegory for the looming war); the tennis player Bill Tilden, about who Ribbentrop bores on; and the brief list of ordinary Austrian men and women who killed themselves as the Germans were, to all intents and purposes, invading, and the life stories Vuillard imagines for them.

I am not sure to whom I'd recommend this book - it seems like something you'd read because you think you should, or because it won't take long - but if you want to know more about the Anschluss beyond its definition, whilst recognising that this is slightly embellished fiction, this novella is less dry than a textbook, and short enough not to overstay its welcome.

(read & reviewed Feb 2019)

Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne

Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018 - but a novel I wanted to read regardless, as I'd been excited about it since I first caught sight of it in early 2017 as an upcoming translated title.

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While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.

It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.

There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.

I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.

The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.

I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.

And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.

I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.

About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”

Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)

(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène, tr. Sarah Adams

aka Just Like Tomorrow. This novella about a Paris-based teenager of Moroccan heritage is taught in schools (as another Goodreads reviewer notes, it's a French A-Level text in England), and could be seen as gritty YA. But unusually - perhaps uniquely - for a YA book, it was longlisted, back in 2007, for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the precursor to the current format of the Booker International.
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[3.5] In translation, it's a very easy read, though for someone recently finished French GCSE (the exam for 16 year olds which is followed by A-level), the slang will take some getting used to. Subject-wise, it technically has that realist 'worthiness' characteristic of the IFFP - it's narrated by an impoverished French-Moroccan teenage girl living on a tough estate on the outskirts of Paris - but it's not in the least dry, so 'worthy' wasn't an adjective that occurred to me while I was reading. This book didn't exist when I was doing A-levels, but Kiffe Kiffe plus an older classic would be a better choice than two of the latter, and certainly gives a less rarefied, and more modern view of France than the likes of Marcel Pagnol.

It's also potentially educational in that there's a lot to look up about French pop culture of the late 90s and early 00s, the sort of casual references you might get IRL: e.g. saying someone looks like a certain daytime TV presenter. (The book makes sense without knowing all these references, but I enjoy finding out this sort of stuff. If you like to look things up as you go, it means that this otherwise very straightforward book might not be the most convenient read for public transport.)

Narrator Doria's voice may grate for some readers (and the ending is perhaps a bit too neat in that YA way). I have never understood why so many older child and teenage narrators pepper their stories with "I wish [really bad thing] would happen to [so and so]". I don't remember thinking this about more than one or two people (and it's not like I was having a great time socially or at home), and I can't ever remember other kids saying it. In books I've read in adulthood, I've usually thought of it as lazy shorthand for a more inchoate childish and youthful dissatisfaction, but as Faïza Guène wrote this when she was still a teenager herself, and she grew up on an estate like Doria's, where many people have far greater material hardship than most of my old classmates, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt in the way that I wouldn't to a well-meaning middle-class 45 year old trying to write the same character.

Some contemporary readers may feel that a certain plot point needs more exploration and discussion, especially for teen readers: when Doria decides she fancies a boy who, a few weeks / months earlier kissed her without her consent, and whom she had previously found quite repellent - and it's clearly presented as a good thing by the end of the book. It struck me how this wouldn't have seemed anything remarkable in fiction, or a magazine anecdote, 20 or even 10 years ago - although by then a similar reaction to being 'ravished' would have been considered off, and bad writing, by many. One could now consider it as a reaction shaped by Doria's dysfunctional family background - which must have been pretty bad as the family had a social worker (although perhaps France allocates them when things are less bad than UK threshholds) - or a lingering subconscious effect of the patriarchal culture she is in many other ways managing to shake off. It's also an example of a popular trope of the 90s and 00s, the nerd gets the girl. But to make it just about the character neglects changing general norms - which have possibly changed more among the young and among Anglo-American liberals than elsewhere. And I find it very interesting as an example of inner emotions changing rapidly - seeing in action the stuff covered by the scholarly field of the history of emotions I referred to the other day in reviewing Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home. It was sad to see how often Doria referred to commercial women's magazines as ways she and others learned about life and relationships (and to shape their views of what was and was not appropriate to feel and do) but also sadly accurate for pre-www girls who had negligible useful support from people they knew. I was kind of glad magazines have waned, but on the consumerism and fashion front, they seemed quite benign compared with what you hear about Instagram and teens now.

I found Kiffe Kiffe really interesting. Contemporary fiction about immigrants, and about poorer people (who aren't struggling creatives) in other European countries is something I've long wanted to read more of, but not much is translated. (And when it is, it's rarely as approachable as this.)

(read and reviewed August 2018, the review on Goodreads.)